Heat removal is a prominent factor in a computer system and data center design. The number of high performance electronics components such as high performance processors packaged inside servers has steadily increased, thereby increasing the amount of heat generated and dissipated during the ordinary operation of the servers. With the fast development of artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing related business and applications, the high performance computing (HPC) becomes more and more important. Thermal management for these high density servers and electronic racks become a challenge.
Energy efficiency in data centers is becoming more and more critical. Cooling system consumes a significant portion of the energy, by cooling fans, blowers, pumps, and chiller compressors. The energy required to operate the air cooling system may increase dramatically with an increase of rack density, which makes the high-density server and rack thermal management is a challenge.
In some applications, especially in data centers, due to the very different requirements from different customers, the rack design, rack density, rack configuration and rack functions are in different. It is a challenge to arrange these racks in the same room or arranged in a cold aisle-hot aisle fashion. The racks adjacent with each may have significant impact on each other. The airflow management is a challenge.
Traditional air cooling may not satisfy the cooling requirement for high density racks. In addition, traditional air cooling systems consume a great amount of energy. The traditional air cooling either use a computer room air handler (CRAH), computer room air conditioner (CRAC), rear door heat exchanger (RDHX), or any other type of solution may not be able to provide sufficient cooling air flow rate in this situation due to the capability limitation of the fans and blowers. Another type of exiting solution is the immersion cooling which the rack is designed as a cooling fluid tank and the entire information technology (IT) equipment are populated within the tank. This solution extracted all the heat to the liquid. However, this solution has several shortfalls and unsolved issues which make it difficult to deploy, such as high cost, long term reliability, operation and serviceability, and IT compatibilities.